Sponsored by JUST BUFFALO LITERARY CENTER NAOMI READER’S SHIHAB NYE GUIDE A Wandering Poet – Naomi Shihab Nye

Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1952 to Aziz Shihab, a Palestinian refugee from Jerusalem, and Miriam Shihab, an American of German and Swiss descent, Nye lived in the Midwest with her parents and brother for 14 years. The family then moved to the to live outside Jerusalem before returning to the States to settle in . Throughout her career, Nye has traveled extensively in Europe, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Middle East, teaching in schools and promoting international goodwill through education and creative expression.

A “wandering poet,” Nye also calls herself a “vagabond with many influences. Women, men, children, animals, a nut.” She is a long-time admirer of the American poet and pacifist , who shared her focus on the intimate, unexamined life, and she also cites writers such as Carl Sandberg, W. S. Merwin and Lucille Clifton as inspiration. Nye was raised on her father’s vivid stories about life back in the Middle East, and on classic poems and children’s tales her mother read to her, from Emily Dickinson to Aesop’s Fables and Little Women. She published her first poem in a children’s magazine when “Naomi Shihab Nye is an American, an Arab, a Poet, a she was seven and has kept a journal for years, basing parent, a woman of , a woman of ideas.” many of her poems and stories on her own experiences. –Bill Moyers, journalist and public commentator She was especially close to her father, a former editor of the Jerusalem Times who later worked as a writer for the Naomi Shihab Nye finds artistic strength in a life spent San Antonio Express News, and his mother, “Sitti” Khadra straddling cultures and countries. A leading contemporary Shihab (“sitti” is Arabic for “grandmother”), whom Nye Palestinian-American writer, she is also regarded as one visited when her family lived in the West Bank. From of the most accomplished female poets of the American them she inherits a unique perspective into what she Southwest. For more than three decades, Nye has been believes is the “primary source” of poetry: “…local life, writing and editing poems, essays, novels and acclaimed random characters met on the streets, our own ancestry children’s books that focus on the everyday lives of sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.” cultures around the world, from Jerusalem to the Latino neighborhoods in her hometown of San Antonio, Texas. Nye’s early free verse chapbooks, Tattooed Feet (1977) and Eye-to-Eye (1978), were followed by her Nye is known for her ability to use simple, spare language first full-length poetry collection,Different Ways to that celebrates and elevates ordinary events, people, places Pray (1980), in which she explores the similarities and and objects. Says Booklist, “Nye is a fluid poet, and her differences between Southwestern American cultures poems are also full of the urgency of spoken language. from the to Mexico. I Feel a Little Jumpy Her direct, unadorned vocabulary serves her well.” Her Around You (1996) pairs 194 “his and her” poems written hunger to explore people’s viewpoints is tempered by a by both a man and a woman, and The Space between Our humble examination of her personal and cultural biases, Footsteps (1998) is a collection of poems and full-color and she demands nothing less of her readers. paintings about the Middle East. 2 With the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, Nye invoked her heritage again by speaking out against terrorism and prejudice. Her concern over the lack of understanding between Westerners and Arabs led to her publication in 2002 of 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, a collection culled from years of writing and a timely finalist for the National Book Award. In the bestselling You and Yours (2005), Nye revisits the Middle East more intimately as a mother and a traveler. Her latest work includes the poetry collection, Transfer (2011), and a forthcoming collection of very short stories, There Is No Long Distance Now (2012).

Transfer is a mixture of short free verse poems, longer narrative pieces and prose poems. Nye dedicates the St. Louis, Missouri book to her father’s story as a proud yet heartbroken Fuel (1998), Nye’s sixth and most acclaimed poetry Palestinian immigrant. Aziz, also a poet and writer, was a collection, is praised for its ability to span many topics, quick-witted, outgoing news reporter who was passionate cultures, time periods and experiences in places she’s lived about his homeland. In one section, Nye includes 11 of or visited, from Japan to Texas. A talented musician, she her father’s poems, “transferring” her book to him. Aziz writes and performs her own songs and has produced two Shihab’s words illustrate how devastated he was by his albums of music—one of which shares a title with Lullaby family’s forced exodus from Jerusalem following Israel’s Raft (1997), a children’s picture book. Nye has also rise to power, and how he lived the rest of his days in compiled and edited several anthologies, including the the United States with a refugee’s embittered hopes of award-winning This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from returning home. “I immigrated to the land of the free, Around the World (1992), The Tree Is Older Than You Are: but my people weren’t free,” he writes in his poem, “We A Bilingual Gathering of Poems & Stories from Mexico with did not have drinking water in the middle of the ocean.” Paintings by Mexican Artists (1995) and Is This Forever, or What?: Poems and Paintings from Texas (2004). Transfer also touches on the ethnic diversity of Nye’s San Antonio, and her experiences abroad in cities like “I never get tired of mixtures,” Nye has said. She borrows Jerusalem and Cairo, to create a collection that bears from Middle Eastern and Native American religions, and witness to a shared narrative—what she writes is a “large writes of her San Antonio work, “My poems and stories family of voices linking human experience. We have often begin with the voices of our neighbors, mostly no borders when we read.” According to the publisher, Mexican American, always inventive and surprising.” BOA Editions, “At the center of these poems is a looking inward, a questioning of things that help the traveler and Nye’s artistic sensitivity and cultural awareness especially of things that should help the traveler but for some reason shine in her well-regarded books for children and do not.” teens. Several are autobiographical and intentionally highlight female accomplishments and histories. Sitti’s Nye subtly navigates the various meanings of “transfer” Secrets (1994) tells the story of an Arab-American girl to convey, carry and send the subject (and her readers) and her Arab grandmother set in a Palestinian village on their own journeys. Physical objects, as well as like the one in which Nye once lived. Habibi (1997), thoughts, are moved, lost or forgotten and picked Nye’s award-winning first young-adult novel, mirrors up again. Airplanes are boarded, and home addresses her life as an Arab-American teenage girl whose family change along with perspectives. Nye negotiates her inner moves to Palestine, despite the decades-long violence in conflict at living in the comfort and safety of America, Jerusalem between Jews and Arabs. Her poetry collection removed geographically from Arab struggles abroad (as Honeybee won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in in “Burlington, Vermont”). She documents American the Children’s/Young Adult category. experiences: the blank stare of a 99-cent store in “Dallas,” 3 a jumble of misplaced jingoism in “Strange Shirts on the four Pushcart Prizes, a Lavan Award from the Academy of Same Day.” Her grief and wry humor appear throughout American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and the book, such as when she finds her father’s last shopping several honors in children’s literature, including two Jane list (he was an enthusiastic cook who published his own Addams Children’s Book Awards. A regular columnist cookbook of Arab recipes), remembers how her mother for Organica and poetry editor for The Texas Observer, discards his ties, and describes how Aziz’s body finally she has been featured on two PBS poetry specials: “The fails him as his busy brain carries on, lost in the streets of Language of Life with Bill Moyers” and “The United his childhood Jerusalem. States of Poetry” as well as on “NOW with Bill Moyers.” She has been a visiting writer at several schools including Nye has said that when creating books for children or the University of Texas at Austin and the University of adults, “to counteract negative images conveyed by Hawai’i. In January 2010 she was elected a Chancellor of blazing headlines, writers must steadily transmit simple the Academy of American Poets. In 1974, Nye received stories closer to heart and more common to everyday her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio, where she life. Then we will be doing our job.” She has been named still lives with her husband, photographer Michael Nye, a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter and their son, Madison. Bynner Fellow of the . She has received

Finding a Dialogue

The years Naomi Shihab Nye spent shifting from one location to the next gave her, at a very early age, an appreciation for cultural difference. “This is one of the best things about growing up in a mixed family or community,” she has said. “You never think only one way of doing or seeing anything is right.” Her literary focus also shifts between the Middle East and the American Southwest, exploring human conflict and connection from her father’s lost Jerusalem to the wounds of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the American-led occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Jerusalem cleansing that drove more than 700,000 Arabs out of “Hello, Palestine” hundreds of villages to make room for Jewish immigrants.

Nye’s father was forced to leave Jerusalem just a few In Transfer, the poems from Aziz’s notebooks show a man years after she was born, during the 1948 war between grappling with the memories of his shattered country the brand-new State of Israel and the Arab nations that and with his forced separation from it. He was always call the “Nakba,” or “Catastrophe.” Aziz looking for ways to connect, Nye writes, always on the Shihab left for St. Louis when he was just 18 and didn’t move, greeting his American friends and neighbors with return until the 1960s when he moved his family back to a cheery “Hello, my friend” that hid his constant sense of his native village of Sinjil in the West Bank. Then came disconnection. This collection is Nye’s way of continuing the 1967 War, and he was forced to return to the United her conversations with her father; it stems from an States for good, to San Antonio. To this day, Palestinians abandoned book project they began together while he consider the establishment of Israel and the loss of their was alive. Transfer is Nye’s attempt to find a dialogue with ancestral homelands as their people’s most devastating him and continue the lost thread that began when she moment in history, and nothing less than a brutal ethnic was a little girl. 4 San Antonio of Driving and Being Driven. As she recounts it in an interview the year the book came out: Nye’s writing also centers on San Antonio, her long- time home and a city of immigrants—a melting pot of He came to pick me up in the dark. He said, Latino, black, white, Palestinian and other ethnic groups ‘because we’re living is such strange times, we who settled in Texas. As a Palestinian-American artist, should ask each other regularly if we are, you educator, wife and mother who lives and works there full know, okay.’ Between my hotel and the airport time, she knows what it’s like to simultaneously belong he made it a habit to ask a minimum of three and stand apart. Her poem “San Antonio,” from Is This times. So after he told me this, he paused and Forever, or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas, reflects said, ‘Are you okay?’ And I said, ‘I was, until I on her ties to this historic Mexican-American town met you.’ steeped in legends of the Alamo and Native American myth: In the same interview and another with Bill Moyers, I remembered the old men Nye recalls feeling a surge of memories about her in the west side café, grandmother after the planes hit the twin towers—a dealing dominoes like magical charms. sense of responsibility to her Arab heritage that, informed It was then I knew, by her world travels, led her to both critique and defend like a woman looking backward, Muslim society. In “Jerusalem,” a poem included in 19 I could not leave you, Varieties of Gazelle, she connects the violence of 9/11 to or find anyone I loved more. the ongoing bloodshed in Israel and Palestine, and then bluntly urges us to look beyond hate and incrimination: And her role there has been unequivocally devoted to “I’m not interested in who suffered the most. I’m breaking down cultural barriers; she once invited all the interested in people getting over it.” Nyes in the San Antonio phonebook to her house for dinner. Over the years, Nye’s feelings have matured from when she lived in the Middle East as a teenager. “I do think In the Southwestern Writers Collection anthology, that as we get older, sometimes we examine culture in What Wildness Is This: Women Write about the Southwest, different ways, how it has affected our own lives, how our (2007), Nye’s short story, “Home Address,” describes the culture parallels things…in other people’s cultures, how proud day she pays off her family’s mortgage on their those variations can actually bring us together.” old home near the San Antonio River. She feels as fully Empathy for different cultures, she insists, comes from at home in the Texas “wilderness” and San Antonio’s listening to each other’s stories, and teaching poetry is a ethnically diverse neighborhoods as she does across powerful yet under-represented way to open students’ eyes the ocean with her family in war-torn Palestine. It is to the world. “I can never understand it when teachers this search for belonging amidst cultural contrasts and claim they are ‘uncomfortable’ with poetry—as if poetry upheaval that gives her writing its power. She says she felt demands they be anything other than responsive, curious confident in representing Mexican-American voices in human beings,” she once said. “If poetry comes out of her anthology, The Tree is Older Than You Are, because “I the deepest places in the human soul and experience, live in one of the most Mexican of U.S. cities, in an inner- shouldn’t it be as important to learn about one another’s city neighborhood where no dinner table feels complete poetry, country to country, as one another’s weather or without a dish of salsa for gravity, and the soft air hums gross national products?” its double tongue… I suggest that blood be bigger than what we’re born with.” The poet William Stafford once called Nye’s work “a poetry of encouragement and heart.” In Transfer, as in so 9/11 many of her other works, her poems speak to us with Nye became more acutely politicized when she joined hopefulness in their own languages. In this book as well the world in decrying the World Trade Center attacks on as her others, Naomi Shihab Nye uses her life’s journeys September 11, 2001. She often tells the story of a post- to find a dialogue with the world. 9/11 taxi ride she once took in Syracuse, New York, and how her interchange with the driver became the theme of 2007’s I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?: Tales 5 Readers Questions

1. Does the title “Transfer” have one meaning, or many? 10. Throughout Transfer, Nye refers to “dialogue”— How does it (or how do they) help define what Naomi between her and her father in her memories of when Shihab Nye is exploring in these poems? he was alive, and in terms of her own identity as a poet and a teacher. Find some poems that illustrate 2. Naomi Shihab Nye tells students who are skeptical this. How do you understand the lines: “we dropped about poetry: “Do you think in complete, elaborate our troubles / into the lap of the storyteller / and they sentences? In fully developed paragraphs with turned into someone else’s”? careful footnotes? Or in flashes and bursts of images, snatches of lines leaping one to the next, descriptive 11. In Aziz’s poems, what is his attitude toward Palestine fragments, sensory details? We think in poetry.” Do as an adult living in the United States? How does he you agree? How do the poems in Transfer illustrate feel about Israel’s invasion of his people’s traditional this claim? homeland?

3. How is Nye’s poetry different from her father’s? How 12. How does Aziz cope with his loneliness and is it similar? Give some examples. disconnection as a refugee?

4. Do you think the collection is more powerful and 13. How would you answer his question in “Everything coherent with the inclusion of Aziz’s poetry? Why or In Our World Did Not Seem To Fit”: “Why was why not? someone else’s need for a home / greater than our own need for our own homes”? To what is he referring? 5. What is missing from Aziz’s life that makes him so homesick? Why does Nye describe him as a “refugee/ 14. Go back and reread the poem, “Fifty Years Since I not always”? When is he, and when isn’t he a refugee? Prayed Or Thought In Arabic.” What importance does Aziz give to journalism, to reporting news, and 6. A recurring theme in Transfer is the shifting place to language itself? What made his professional work called “home,” and how traveling affects one’s “magical” to him, and how might that magic be definition of home. What does “home” mean in important to Palestinians as a whole? Find examples Nye’s poems as well as in her father’s? Find specific where Nye describes the magic and power of words. examples. 15. What effect does war in the Middle East have on 7. How does Nye incorporate and connect current Aziz and Nye throughout their lives? Give specific events with history in her poetry? How does this examples in these poems. echoing of her late father’s profession in journalism impact her poems? 16. Both Aziz and Nye write about memory—distinct recollections and flashbacks of conversations, people, 8. Identify some of the commonplace objects (i.e. objects and places. Give some examples and explain stones, cucumbers, fig leaves, lentil soup, etc.) that how each poem succeeds in illustrating that specific Nye mentions. What do they signify in terms of memory. Is it through emotion or detail, or both? her memories of her father? Of her relationship to her surroundings? Why are these seemingly small 17. What are some memories both daughter and father physical objects so important to her? are fearful of losing, and others they know they have already lost? 9. What role does food play in both Nye’s poems and her father’s? Find some examples. 18. What is hopeful about the poetry in Transfer?

6 19. Find some examples where Nye uses humor or comic 20. Which is your favorite poem? Least favorite? Explain relief to give lightness to a dark situation, where she why, using some of the themes discussed above. puts on her “armor of joy.” How is her use of humor effective? How does it change the meaning of the poems?

Selected Bibliography

Poetry Picture Books Different Ways to Pray, Breitenbush (Portland, OR) 1980. Sitti’s Secrets, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, Macmillan (New On the Edge of the Sky, Iguana Press (Madison, WI) 1981. York, NY) 1994. Hugging the Jukebox, Dutton (New York, NY) 1982. Benito’s Dream Bottle, illustrated by Yu Cha Pak, Simon & Yellow Glove, Breitenbush (Portland, OR) 1986. Schuster (New York, NY) 1995. Invisible, Trilobite (Denton, TX) 1987. Lullaby Raft, illustrated by Vivienne Flesher, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY) 1997. Red Suitcase, BOA Editions (Rochester, NY) 1994. Baby Radar, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, Greenwillow Words under the Words: Selected Poems, Far Corner Books Books (New York, NY) 2003. (Portland, OR) 1995. Fuel, BOA Editions (Rochester, NY) 1998. Other Anthologies Tattooed Feet (chapbook) 1977. Eye-to-Eye (chapbook), 1978. (Editor) This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from around the World, Four Winds Press (New York, NY) 1992. Recordings include Rutabaga-Roo (songs), Flying Cat (San Antonio, TX), 1979; Lullaby Raft, Flying Cat (San (Editor) The Tree Is Older Than You Are: Poems and Stories from Antonio, TX), 1981; and The Spoken Page (poetry reading), Mexico, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY) 1995. International Poetry Forum (Pittsburgh, PA), 1988. (Editor, with Paul Janeczko) I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You: Mint (prose) State Street Press (Brockport, NY) 1991. A Book of Her Poems and His Poems Collected in Pairs, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY) 1996. Never in a Hurry (essays for young adults), University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC) 1996. (Selector) What Have You Lost? (young-adult poetry), with photographs by husband, Michael Nye, Greenwillow Books Habibi (novel for young adults), Simon & Schuster (New (New York, NY) 1999. York, NY) 1996. (Selector) Salting the Ocean: 100 Poems by Young Poets, illustrated by Ashley Bryan, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY) 2000. Come with Me: Poems for a Journey, with images by Dan Yaccarino, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY) 2000. (With others) The Space between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1998, published as The Flag of Childhood: Poems from the Middle East, Aladdin (New York, NY) 2002. Nineteen Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY) 2002. Is This Forever, or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY) 2004. Sweet Sifter in Time: Poems for Girls, illustrated by Terre Maher, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY) 2005.

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